The Gunn Show - 8.11.24
Thoughts on contrast, magic, and the thrill of sports.
Hi everyone!
And welcome to the Gunn Show. Sending this week’s newsletter a bit later today as a function of travel home - I was out in the oil fields of Midland, TX for the week watching our AA team play.
This week’s edition focuses on a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a number of years - what is it that makes sports so thrilling and keeps us coming back? From my perspective, there are some things to be learned from two important concepts in life - contrasts and magic - that sports weave together naturally to create thrilling experiences. Hope you enjoy, and as always please share any thoughts you have after reading my way.
Catch you all next week!
- CG
What I’m Thinking - On Contrasts, Magic and the Thrill of Sport
Monday night, at approximately 10pm CT, our miniature bernedoodle - and fearless protector - was barking madly in the apartment. She had snapped to attention at the behest of some loud noises in the apartment, but little did she know that there was nothing to fear. Because those sounds were coming from a familiar source - yours truly.
Brooklyn and I were watching the Rangers game in the living room, and Josh Smith had just hit a two-run walk-off homer in the bottom of the tenth inning to, as Dave Raymond so perfectly put it on the broadcast, “pull a rabbit out of the hat” for the Rangers to take down the Houston Astros 4-3. And I was some kind of excited. It was a big game and thus a big win, magnified by the stakes of the division race at hand. But even more so by the fashion in which it happened - it was victory, snatched from the jaws of defeat by a crack of the bat, and a ball in the seats.
Moments like those are hard to top, and while the encore the next day didn’t quite serve as a repeat, there was certainly an underlying rhyme to the story of the game. The Astros sent their ace Framber Valdez to the mound for Game 2 in order to stop the bleeding, and he did more than just that. For 8 and 2/3 innings he was in exceptional form, defying bats with a mix of sinkers and curveballs to stand on the precipice of his second no-hitter in two seasons. That is until somehow, on a night where nearly every pitch was perfect for Framber, one slipped away - an 85 mph slider that hung in the middle of the plate long enough for Corey Seager to give the fans in the right field bleacher a souvenir, breaking the no-hitter and bringing the Rangers within two runs of tying the lead.
And while we ultimately lost that second game, I couldn’t help but leave with a similar feeling to Monday night. Now, it certainly wasn’t the same feeling of elation that I had after the walk-off. The outcomes were different, after all, and so too were the overarching emotions that came in the aftermath. But even so, I knew the two games possessed an underlying similarity - one that was divorced from what the final scoreboard said and instead focused on the full story of the game rather than its ending alone. Because while Monday and Tuesday’s games were different in a myriad of ways, they were ultimately similar in one critical fashion: both games were thrilling beyond belief.
A life in sport has caused me to spend a great deal of time thinking about this concept - what is it about sports that makes them so thrilling - so captivating - to those of us that play or watch them? Why, of all the things that we could possibly be entertained by, do we keep coming back to competitive athletics? It wasn’t until those two games this week, juxtaposed back-to-back, that I think I finally found answer.
If you think deeply about both of those games, you’ll notice that the thrill comes from the same place: each offered the likelihood of one outcome, and then presented another one instead. In the case of Game 1, an Astros win was all but guaranteed until Smith’s fateful swing. In the case of Game 2, Framber’s dominance for 26 outs led us to believe that the 27th was an inevitability - until Seager had other plans. Two unique scripts, two unique outcomes - but each game borrowed from the same underlying guideline: create a contrast between two things → promise one → deliver the other.
This sequence is not too dissimilar from magic, and how magicians set you up to fall for a trick: they present you with a set of context clues, and lead you to make a prediction about what will happen next. And then, right at the moment that you are about to have that prediction validated, they pull the rug out from under your feet and steer the outcome in a different direction. They make you think you are about to see the Seven of Hearts, and then wham - it’s the Ace of Spades. The ‘sleight of hand’ is only made possible by the fact that you think there is a specific ‘hand’ coming in the first place.
Sports, like magicians, are expectation violation machines. And as such, they rely on contrasts between likely and unlikely outcomes in order to create a sense of awe and wonder. The more you watch them over time, the more you become attuned to the ‘usual’ course of events that a game takes. Take the case of Game 1 and the walk-off. If you’ve watched enough baseball you likely go into the last at-bat knowing that there is a possibility of a game-winning home run, but at the same time recognizing that the probability of that scenario coming to fruition is in fact quite low. Sure, you’ve seen some walk-offs over the course of your life, but you’ve also seen that same scenario end in a game-ending out many more times than not. Regardless of what your hope may be, your expectation is much more skewed towards “game over, we lose” than it is towards “game over, we win”. It is the violation of that expectation in the positive direction that makes the walk-off so elating.
But while the two share many similarities, sports differ from magic in a key way: namely, that there is not always a sleight of hand or misdirection to be had. Unlike in magic where you have 100% certainty that there is a trick to be played out, there are many times in sports where the game goes exactly how you would expect - the 1 seed cruises past the 16 seed in the NCAA tournament, the team that jumped out to a three touchdown lead in the first half is never threatened in the second.
Frequently, these are the type of contests that the average fan would describe as “boring” - there is no violation in expectation, no twist in the story. But I think there is something important here to recognize: these types of outcomes in sports are a feature, not a bug.
Because without these contrasts - between success and failure, between regular and irregular, between likely and unlikely - we are unable to fully appreciate both sides. One needs the other, in the same way that the light needs the dark. Without the mundane, the spectacular would never carry any weight.
We can see this represented in the win probability chart of the Smith walk-off game, which highlights each team’s chances of victory at various points throughout the game:
The gravity of the last swing is captured well, represented by the sharp line downwards at the far right. One swing led to a massive change in win probability: prior to when the pitch was thrown and hit for a homer, Houston had an 85%+ probability of winning the baseball game. Afterwards, those odds dropped all the way to 0% as the Rangers mobbed Smith at home plate.
It’s easy to take a look at this chart and see why sports are such thrilling spectacles - there are few things in life like them that are capable of swinging the odds so substantially on but a single action. But the point I think worth making here is that focusing on the last point alone misses the boat - it is not about it or the point before it, but ultimately the contrast between the two that creates the significance. It is that delta - in this case between 85% and 0% - that sets us up for elation; that presents the opportunity for our expectations to be violated, and thus for our hopes to be validated.
A corollary here is to recognize that each of the points on this chart is dependent on thousands of similar situations that came before it. What has happened in the past helps inform our expectation of what will happen in the future, especially in the realm of sport. So at the end of the day, the 85% to 0% swing that is so thrilling is in fact only made possible - and powerful - by everything that happened before it that did not result in the same outcome. All of the 3-2 games where that single, final out was recorded and any possible dramatics were snuffed out accordingly.
And so, I’d challenge us to keep this lesson in mind the next time each of us is watching a game - whichever side of the ‘boring’/’thrilling’ spectrum it comes to reside on. Remember that sports revolve around contrast - that the sours of defeat are necessary for the elation of victory, that the mundane is an ingredient in the recipe for the spectacular.
Because at the end of the day, the thrill of the rabbit coming out of the hat is only magic if we don’t expect it in the first place.
What I’m Reading
The Science Behind the 400m Sprint - Trung Phan (~1 min)
This was a fascinating look into the science behind one of the Olympics’s crown jewel events - the 400m sprint - with a specific focus on how the race pushes the boundaries of human metabolism. If you are a science nerd like me, it was especially cool to see how different 50-100m intervals of the race challenge different aspects of the human body’s ability to create energy.
Lessons from Whiplash on Transcending Mediocrity (~3 min)
Whiplash is one of my favorite movies in the past 10 years or so, thanks partly because of Miles Teller’s spectacular acting but mostly the film’s commentary on the sacrifices and standards that are often necessary for greatness. I always find this scene to be a great reminder that it is not always comfortable to have someone hold us to high standards, but often times it is exactly the thing we need to transcend mediocrity and become the best version of ourselves.
How to Create a Villain - Nathan Baugh (~5 min)
This was a great read from Nathan on what makes a good villain tick, and one that ties nicely into this week’s theme as good villain and hero combinations also rely on contrast. Through the lens of Luke Skywalker (Star Wars), Killmonger (Black Panther), and The Joker (Batman), Nathan shows how good villains are not stand-alones but rather complements to the heroes they oppose. As he says:
Remember the Joker’s iconic line to Batman, “You… you complete me.”
The best villains aren't simply obstacles to be overcome. They're reflections, inversions, or exaggerations of the hero’s own traits.
The hero needs the villain, in the same way the villain needs the hero.
The Cost of Apathy - Jack Raines (~10 min)
A eye-opening read from Jack on one of the greatest risks of life: not doing much of anything with the time that you have been given. This is especially relevant in today’s world where many people can lead a comfortable life with a fairly limited amount of effort, meaning that we all too often life our lives on autopilot rather than with intentionality. This part from Jack was especially good:
The point of life is to live, and living isn’t a spectator sport.
Living means taking risks, pursuing your interests, embarrassing yourself, attempting difficult things, setting ambitious goals, trying, failing, and trying again. Living means pushing your mind and body to their limits, just to see what you’re capable of. Living means fighting back against the inertial forces that draw all of us toward the apathetic life. Living means being the protagonist of your own story, not a passenger whose outcomes are at the mercy of their environment.
Highly recommend you carve out 10 minutes of your day to read the full piece.
9 Uncomfortable Signs of Personal Growth - Sahil Bloom (~9 min)
If the above piece from Jack stirred something inside youI, this is a great follow up read on how to cultivate awareness for signs that you are stimulating personal growth. Two of my favorite signs to be on the lookout for from Sahil’s list:
You stop concerning yourself with how your growth makes others feels and
You start cringing at yourself from six months ago
All nine are worth the read.
